Our shop sells a good amount of vintage comics. Sales seem to be concentrated at the comic conventions but the odd sale here and the odd sale there at the shop do add up to a respectable figure by the end of the year. We have a sister store in Barrie, Ontario called Blue Beetle Comics and for some reason I’ve never sent a lot of vintage comics up there, always figured we knew how to sell this stuff and those rookies up there didn’t!
Thankfully the Blue Beetle crew called me on this issue so I’ve been sending up some quality vintage comics over the past few months.
It really shouldn’t surprise me but sales have been great! Just today we received an email listing 4 more vintage comic sales.
Taking them off inventory I noticed 3 of them were Amazing Spider-Man comics and come to think of it a good portion of the last batch that sold up there were Spideys.
Now I’ve been selling vintage comics since the mid 1980s and if it’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that Spidey’s always sell! I’ll clarify that, Amazing Spider-Man as a title always sells (I’m including Amazing Fantasy #15 since it is Spider-Man’s 1st appearance and is a must for Amazing Spider-Man collectors).
Amazing Spider-Man absolutely rules the vintage comic book market!
Anyway, I got curious so I jumped on to the GPAnalysis comic sales tracking sight to see if my bold claim could be backed up by hard data.
First off, I will not give any exact data because I’m probably not allowed so please excuse my vagueness.
I looked at tracked sales of CGC graded comics over the past year (note that these figures do not represent all the CGC sales, just the ones tracked by this site).
I grouped all the comics sold including the Silver Age (the 1960’s and the age Spider-Man was introduced), the Bronze Age (the 1970s) and the Modern Age (the 1980s to now). What I found was that Amazing Spider-Man accounted for an astounding 25% of the dollars traded. The second place title did not even come close at 7.5%.
Over 1 in every 4 dollars traded in Vintage Silver/Bronze/Modern Age comics are Spidey dollars.
I know what you’re thinking; Batman or Superman would kick his butt if you include the old Golden Age comics. We’ll you’d be wrong.
If you added up all 70 plus years worth of all 4 of the big DC titles Action Comics, Detective Comics, Superman Comics and Batman Comics you still would not add up to the dollars activity generated by Amazing Spider-Man and the 1 Amazing Fantasy book.
The comic book back issue market is the Spider-Man back issue market.
